A Child of Our Time | Portland Symphonic Choir A Child of Our Time Wednesday, May 11 | Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall Join with us and experience an evening of outstanding choral music and thought provoking visual imagery, as the Portland Symphonic Choir present’s Michael Tippett’s oratorio, “A Child of Our Time.” Conscientious objector Michael Tippett wrote this work in the midst of WWII, and it was performed in 1944, months before the end of the war. The work, carefully laid out in three parts, was written in response to the events that led to Kristallnacht, the wave of anti-Jewish pogroms that began in 1938. Tippett examines the underlying themes that informed that event. He interweaves African American spirituals with references to the oratorios of Bach and Handel in a timeless work about human light and darkness, despair and hope, and the dreadful destruction of war. The Oregon Jewish Museum has partnered with the Portland Symphonic Choir to curate a series of images that will be projected during the performance, adding a powerful visual component to the event.

“We are thankful for OJM’s partnership on this project,” says Dr. Steven Zopfi, Artistic Director for the Portland Symphonic Choir. “We believe that the images will truly bring to life the experience the composer was living as he wrote the work, and will engage our community in a deeper understanding of social justice issues throughout time.” As you listen and experience the visual display, themes of light and dark resolve into optimism, and we celebrate the overcoming of adversity while still recognizing the work left to do. Come early and discover what social justice programs and organizations are operating here in the greater Portland-Metro area. Several nonprofit organizations will be partnering with the choir and providing information about how we can all best serve our community through awareness, activism and voluntarism. Joining 140 members of the Portland Symphonic Choir onstage will be 49 members of the Portland Sinfonietta and four outstanding soloists, featuring: Marlette Buchanan, Soprano Marlette is an accomplished performer of opera, musical theatre and other genres of music and has been noted by reviewers as a “soprano of extended range, flexibility, warmth, color… and beauty”. Ms.

Buchanan’s operatic roles include Fiordiligi and Despina in Cosi fan Tutte, Euridice in Orfeo ed Eduridice, Marenka in The Bartered Bride, Antonia in The Tales of Hoffman, Blanche in Dialogue of the Carmelites as well as roles in Porgy and Bess. Her musical theatre credits include roles in Showboat, Ain’t Misbehavin’, Once on this Island, and Ragtime. Marlette is a graduate of Boston University with a Master of Music degree. She attended Fisk University for a Bachelor of Arts degree where she toured nationally and recorded as the lead soloist with the Jubilee Singers. A regional finalist at the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, Ms. Buchanan also was a finalist in the national MacAllister Awards and the Eleanor Lieber Awards. Her concert performances include Orff’s Carmina Burana, Fanshawe’s African Sanctus, Spohr’s Sechs Deutsches Lieder, and Carter’s Spiritual Cantata. Ms. Buchanan has recorded with a broad range of recording artists extending her versatility in vocal performance.

Additionally, she can be heard as the soloist in the film documentary entitled The Freedom Riders. Andre Flynn, Bass Baritone An active performer in the Northwest for more than 30 years in opera, oratorio, concert and recital, Flynn’s appearances with Portland Opera include Don Prudenzio in Il Viaggio a Reims, Dr. Grenvil in La Traviata, Montano in Otello, Angelotti in Tosca and many others. Recent credits include Cadmus in Semele in the Baroque Opera Workshop, 2nd Handwerkbursche in Wozzeck in the Astoria Music Festival and Ferrando in Il Trovatore with the Portland SummerFest Opera. With Eugene Opera, he has performed Bonze in Madama Butterfly and Simone in Gianni Schicchi. Most recent oratorio performances include Dvorak’s Stabat Mater and Handel’s Messiah with Boise Master Chorale and Mozart’s Requiem with Oregon Repertory Singers. He has been a featured soloist with the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra and The Basically Bach Festival. Mr.

Flynn was the winner of the 1981 Alaska District Metropolitan Opera Auditions and the 1979 and 1981 Alaska Biennial Competitions. In addition to his solo performing he has been as member of Portland’s Choral Cross-Ties and The Montana Chorale. Carl Halvorson, Tenor Since his auspicious debut under the sponsorship of Young Concerts Artists, Mr. Halvorson has given over eighty solo recitals in America and in Europe. n 2009, Mr. Halvorson made his company debut with Portland Operaand has since performed numerous roles for the company including The Emperor (Turandot), Torquemada (L’Heure Espagnole), Don Curzio (Le Nozze di Figaro, andThe Reporter(Orphée) of Philip Glass. He looks forward to additional assignments with Portland Opera including Normanno (Lucia di Lammermoor), 3rd Jew (Salome), and Dr. Caius (Falstaff). An active recording artist, Mr.

Halvorson’s performance of Haydn’s Creation was recorded on the Newport Classics label, as was his performance of Cherubini’s Médée at Alice Tully Hall. For BMG Classics, he has recorded Paul Bowles’s The Wind Remains with EOS Music. His Lieder recording “Despite and Still”, with pianist Susan Almasi, is available on the Musical Heritage Society label. Angela Niederloh, Mezzo Soprano Acclaimed by the New York Times as, “a charismatic mezzo soprano” Niederloh recently made her Portland Opera debut as Melibea in Il viaggio a Rheim. A recent participant in the Houston Grand Opera Studio, Ms. Niederloh was last seen as Meg Page in Falstaff, Karolka in Jenůfa and Second Lady in Die Zauberflöte. Equally at home on the concert stage, Ms. Niederloh’s solo credit’s include performances with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, San Francisco Opera Orchestra, Oregon Symphony, Aspen Festival Orchestra, Columbia Symphony, Choral Arts Ensemble and Choral Crossties. An active participant in many of the nation’s most respected competitions, Ms.

Niederloh was a national finalist in the 2000 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, winner and audience favorite in the Eleanor Lieber Award Competition, second place in the MacAllister Vocal Competition, second place in the Dallas Opera Guild Vocal Competition, and finalist in the McCollum Vocal Competition. Ms. Niederloh is also actively sought after nationally for music clinic workshops for choirs and individuals and currently serves as a faculty member at Pacific University. A Child of Our Time | LA Phil A Child of Our Time Last Modified: May 14, 2012 Orchestration: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, cymbals, strings, chorus, and soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, and bass soloists.

First Los Angeles Philharmonic performance: March 23, 1978, with soprano Carmen Balthrop, mezzo-soprano Jennifer Jones, tenor Michael Best, bass Marvin Hayes, and the Los Angeles Master Chorale and Interdenominational Choirs, Sir Michael Tippett conducting. "The morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." -- Job, 38:7 "…the darkness declares the glory of light." -- T. S. Eliot, from Murder in the Cathedral, quoted on the title page of Tippett’s A Child of Our Time Social activism is not the first thing that comes to mind when one recalls details of great composers’ lives. Of course, the story of Beethoven furiously erasing his Eroica Symphony’s dedication to Napoleon is legend. Unhappy with the marauding Emperor for abandoning the principles that the French Revolution -- and Napoleon -- had stood for until 1804, Beethoven decided enough was enough. Not terribly heroic stuff, really, but noteworthy for a composer. Sir Michael Tippett, on the other hand, was a man who took risks in the name of political and social causes throughout his career.

He held steadfastly to messages of universal understanding and brotherhood in his music, in his writings, and in his personal life. A famous example from Tippett’s life was his arrest and subsequent jailing in the early 1940s as a conscientious objector. His opera librettos and vocal texts also often contend with social issues and topics such as Jungian psychoanalysis, racial tension, and homosexuality, among others. His The Knot Garden (1966-69) is the first opera to portray an openly gay couple; the plot of The Ice Break (1973-76) encompasses conflicts of race and intergenerational issues. His last opera, New Year (1985-88), features two orphans, one white and one black, whose foster mother is a psychologist and a bit of a social misfit. Not exactly your typical operatic characters. A Child of Our Time, an oratorio which acknowledges and draws from the tradition of both George Frideric Handel and J.S. Bach, is perhaps Tippett’s most famous work.

He began writing the oratorio at the very beginning of World War II in response to his outrage at the world’s apathy to the plight of Jewish refugees. The story is based on headlines ripped from the newspapers of the day. Tippett had read about Henschel Grynsban, a young Polish Jew who had fled to France to escape the Nazi pogrom. Grynsban’s mother and father, left behind, were apparently suffering at the hands of the Nazi persecutors. The young man snapped and killed a minor Nazi official in Paris; the Nazi retribution was severe and vigorous (his parents were executed and the young Grynsban disappeared). The story affected Tippett deeply and inspired this oratorio, a work which Newsweek magazine de-scribed (nearly 30 years later) as "something Handel might have written had he lived in the age of Auschwitz." This composition exemplifies Tippett’s typical musical style, a style born of his practical knowledge as choir director at Morley College, where his focus was on amateur and unemployed professional musicians. He created his own libretto, a practice which he would pursue in all of his subsequent operas.

He was also drawn to popular and folk music; in the case of this work he grounded the composition in the African American spiritual, using well-known works as the chorale interludes for the choir, much as Bach used Lutheran chorales -- which everyone in the congregation knew -- as moments of reflection on action that has just taken place. Tippett also drew inspiration from the spiritual melodies for his own composition, both his text and his setting. He reveled in traditional musical techniques in this work. All through A Child of Our Time, one can hear traditional counterpoint and imitative vocal writing, triadic harmonies, and repetition. He also makes use of time-honored oratorio and opera devices, including the recitatives (a style in which the vocalist, in this case almost always the bass who also serves as the narrator, "recites" the story and moves the action along), the aria (songs in which individual vocal soloists are featured), ensembles including duets and trios, as well as the continuous presence of the orchestra in the entire work. A Child of Our Time is divided into three parts, each part corresponding to a particular section of the newspaper story which spawned the oratorio.

Tippett used both Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s Passions as a foundation: he substituted Negro spirituals for what would have been the traditional Lutheran chorales in a Bach work, for example. According to Tippett himself, these spirituals (which Tippett altered to be more harmonically static than the original spirituals) serve as moments of repose and reflection between other sections in the oratorio. According to Tippett, he borrowed the three-part macro-structure of Messiah as a model for his oratorio: "Part I deals with the general state of oppression in our time; Part II presents… the story of a young man’s attempt to seek justice… and the catastrophic consequences; while Part III considers the moral to be drawn, if any." Indeed, the first part prepares the scene, as the "darkness" is revealed.

Evil has gripped the land ("pogroms in the East, lynchings in the West," among the many calamities), and the tenor soloist (who represents the Jewish boy) is despondent: "how can I grow to a man’s stature?" The first section ends with the spiritual "Steal Away to Jesus." (This spiritual is also a reference to stealing away, as in escaping from captivity.) The persecutors and persecuted are caught in a whirlpool of hate, into which the second section of the oratorio plunges headlong. The scapegoat -- the child of our time -- is identified. By using the African American as his source for the music, and the European Jew as his inspiration for the libretto, Tippett has indeed encapsulated "scapegoatism" in two of its most heinous manifestations in recent history. After reaching the breaking point, the young boy (the tenor) snaps and kills his "dark brother": "his other self rises in him, demonic and destructive. He shoots the official…" The second section ends with the chorus recalling the story of the Israelites’ bondage in Egypt ("Go Down, Moses"), a hymn which symbolized the similar fate of African Americans.

In the final section, Tippett attempts to make sense of the events that have transpired -- in this case, the egregious violence, the suffering, and the deprivation that has just occurred. The composer’s message is clear: recrimination and vengeance are not the answer. According to Tippett, we must first seek compassion for our fellow humans and find a way to embrace even the darkness that lies in wait within us all. The text for A Child of Our Time was prepared by Tippett himself, though he had originally asked poet T. S. Eliot to write it. Eliot said that he would, but needed Tippett to "do his homework for him" and outline what he had in mind, how many songs, which would feature soloists, which chorus, etc. Tippett’s sketches for Eliot were so complete, and in such direct and elegantly simple language, that Eliot felt that his contribution would be at odds with Tippett’s text. Eliot suggested that Tippett complete the text himself, which he did.

Perhaps because of its universal themes, straightforward language, and often traditional musical materials, A Child of Our Time has endured and become Tippett’s most recorded and performed work; the gospel chorale interludes have even been excerpted for performance separate from the oratorio. It may well be that the work’s universal, truly premonitory quality, has also kept this oratorio in the repertoire. Tippett addressed this issue himself, writing 35 years later in Music of the Angels (from 1980 -- a few years after the Pol Pot regime’s massacres in Cambodia and several years before Slobadon Milosevic’s rampages in Bosnia and Kosovo): "When I wrote the work, I was so engulfed in the actions of the period, I never considered its prophetic quality.

But it seems that the growing violence springing out of divisions of nation, race, religion, status, color, or even just rich and poor is possibly the deepest present threat to the social fabric of all human society." A Child of Our Time was premiered on March 19, 1944 by the London Civil Defense and Morley College Choirs with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, led by Walter Goehr, at the Royal Adelphi Theatre in London. Peter Pears was the tenor soloist; Joan Cross [the creator of the role of Ellen Orford in Britten’s Peter Grimes] was the soprano. Composer Dave Kopplin, who holds a Ph.D. from UCLA, is a writer and program editor for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Hollywood Bowl. He also is a lecturer in music at Loyola Marymount University.

Simon Rattle conducts Tippett’s “A Child of Our Time” Simon Rattle conducts Tippett’s “A Child of Our Time” The Last Days of Socrates for bass baritone, choir and orchestra (01:00:16) Sir John Tomlinson Bass, Rundfunkchor Berlin, Simon Halsey Chorus Master Michael Tippett A Child of Our Time (01:09:57) Sally Matthews Soprano, Sarah Connolly Contralto, Matthew Polenzani Tenor, Sir John Tomlinson Bass, Rundfunkchor Berlin, Simon Halsey Chorus Master free Brett Dean: Composing Socrates (00:14:40) free Artist biographies From Berliner Philharmoniker musician to internationally renowned composer – that’s Brett Dean’s career in a nutshell. In the process of arranging and improvising, the Australian-born violist discovered the composer in himself. His clarinet concerto Ariel’s Music, chosen for the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers, and the ballet One of a Kind brought him international renown. Encouraged by their success, Dean decided in 2000 to devote himself principally to composition.

Ties to his old orchestra have nonetheless remained intact. Berlin audiences may well remember his orchestral work Komarov’s Fall, which the Philharmoniker commissioned. That makes it all the more gratifying that yet another new work by Brett is given its first performance at this concert. Michael Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time, by contrast, was not commissioned. The English composer felt compelled by a real-life event to write it in protest against dictatorship and racism. In 1938 a 17-year-old boy, Herschel Grynszpan, was provoked by the anti-Semitic treatment of his family to shoot a secretary at the German embassy in Paris. The attack provided the Nazis with a pretext for the pogrom in Germany known as Kristallnacht. Tippett’s musical treatment of the Grynszpan incident follows the oratorio concept of Bach and Handel. Ever since the work brought about his artistic breakthrough in 1944, Tippett has taken his place alongside Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten as one of the leading English composers of the 20th century.

From the Last Days of Socrates to the “Twentieth-Century Blues” Dean’s The Last Days of Socrates and Tippett’s A Child of Our Time Sir Michael Tippett was a committed pacifist. He joined the British peace movement in 1934, intensively studied the writings of Mahatma Gandhi and was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment as a conscientious objector in June 1943. In his oratorio A Child of Our Time, which he composed in reaction to the incidents surrounding the Nazi pogrom in November 1938, the composer took a stand against the events of his day and vigorously opposed all forms of violence, oppression and discrimination. Critical references to political and contemporary events are also found in Brett Dean’s oeuvre, for example, in the orchestral work Ceremonial, Dean’s personal protest against the war in Iraq.

In his string quartet Eclipse, the Australian composer responded to the Tampa crisis, which occurred in the Indian Ocean in August 2001 – a conflict that arose as a result of the hard-line stance of the Australian government against the boat people who tried to reach Australian territorial waters and were rescued at sea by the crew of the Norwegian freighter Tampa. Dean’s Pastoral Symphony for chamber orchestra and tape, on the other hand, focuses on the contrast between unspoiled nature and environmental pollution in Queensland – the Australian state in whose capital, Brisbane, the composer was born in 1961. Brett Dean: The Last Days of Socrates Dean’s latest work, composed in 2012 for bass-baritone, chorus and orchestra, was commissioned by the Rundfunkchor Berlin, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. As the title indicates, the three-part composition deals with the ancient philosopher Socrates, who lived during the age of Athenian democracy. Like every Athenian, he took an active interest in political life, spent a great deal of time in the agora and other public places and involved his fellow citizens in discussions during which he critically questioned human thinking and behaviour.

In 399 BC Socrates was accused of heresy by his enemies (there was no freedom of expression on religious matters in ancient Greece!) – an accusation with which conservative Athenians had for decades persecuted people who, in their opinion, undermined the traditional social fabric of the city by questioning conventional ways of thinking. The fact that the philosopher was actually sentenced to death by a court of jurors is still a source of controversy today. During the voting procedure, jury members cast one of two different kinds of coins – one with a hole and one without – into a terracotta vessel; Dean uses this sound twice in his score, calling for three tuned terracotta bowls to be played by two of the percussionists. Graeme William Ellis wrote the libretto for The Last Days of Socrates on the basis of texts from Plato’s dialogues. In addition to the Apology of Socrates, the Australian poet drew primarily on texts in which Plato shares the last phase of the popular teacher’s life with his readers: the Crito and the Phaedo.

Ellis established a link between the first recorded legal scandal in human history and the present, however, by incorporating a quote from the contemporary Chinese artist, dissident and human rights activist Ai Weiwei in the second movement: “Liberty is about our rights to question everything.” The composition begins with a Prelude appealing to the goddess Athena. The movement opens with an introduction based on mysterious veils of sound and pedal points, in which distant solo violins provide surreal, whirring string harmonics. The pivotal second section, Apology, is devoted to Socrates’ defence before the court. In Plato’s account, the philosopher reduces the charges to absurdity, declaring that he was only accused because he pointed out the Athenians’ mistakes and weaknesses, thus angering them. During the third section (Phaedo), in which Dean calls for a small chorus of offstage sopranos, Socrates’ students Crito and Phaedo are present in the prison at the moment when their esteemed teacher drinks the cup of poison. Socrates remains true to the position taken in Plato’s earlier work, Gorgias, that it is better to suffer injustice than to do wrong yourself – he had ruled out escape from the very beginning, since it would violate the law.

One last time Socrates emphasizes that only his body will die, whereas his soul is immortal, so he will not depart this life with sorrow or fear. The music is in the piano range throughout; after isolated choral interjections over a string soundscape punctuated with string harmonics, it fades away with an ascending vocalise glissando by the offstage sopranos. Michael Tippett: A Child of Our Time The title of Tippett’s oratorio is taken from Ödön von Horváth’s 1938 novel Ein Kind unserer Zeit. The text is by the composer himself, although Tippett had sent T. S. Eliot (whom he referred to as his “spiritual father”) his own draft libretto, which the poet returned to him with the “unexpected advice” that Tippett complete it himself.

“The work,” wrote the composer, “began to come together with the sounds of the shot itself – prophetic of the imminent gunfire of the war – and the shattering of glass in the Kristallnacht.” During his work Tippett realized that he had reached the “turning-point in my compositional output, both in terms of technique – I had learnt how to handle an extended dramatic form – and in subject matter: for now at last I had found my true role in singing those twentieth-century blues.” A Child of Our Time follows the three-part structure of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah.

Tippett also paid tribute to Johann Sebastian Bach, both with musical quotations and by inserting “chorales” – Negro spirituals which, according to the composer, “act as modern chorales, in that we all are moved by them beyond the power of the tunes as mere music, yet the spirituals themselves have turned and twisted Bible language into a modern dialect; the stories they tell of the Bible Jews are used to comfort Negroes in the bitterness of oppression, and I use these Negro spirituals to symbolize the agony of modern Jews in Hitler’s Europe.” At the same time, the oratorio is dedicated to anyone who is “rejected, cast out from the centre of our society onto the fringes: into slums, into concentration camps, into ghettos.” The first part of the work describes the general state of oppression; part II “presents the particular story of a young man’s attempt to seek justice by violence and the catastrophic consequences; while part III considers the moral to be drawn, if any.” The premiere of A Child of our Time, which took place in London on 19 March 1944, brought the work long-term success which has continued to this day.

“It is probably every composer’s dream,” Tippett wrote in his 1991 autobiography Those TwentiethCentury Blues, “that something he or she has written will reach an audience in the world at large. In my case, A Child of Our Time really does seem to have spoken its message in most parts of the globe.” Harald Hodeige Tippett: A Child of Our Time - Michael Tippett | Songs, Reviews, Credits | AllMusic Tippett: A Child of Our Time AllMusic Rating google+ AllMusic Review by James Leonard For fans of the music of Michael Tippett , the first great work -- the first work to establish him as a composer and the first work in which he is recognizably himself -- was his oratorio A Child of Our Time. Composed between 1939 and 1941 and premiered in London in 1944, A Child of Our Time combines the monumentality of Handel and the rhythms of jazz, the massiveness of Beethoven and the lyricism of the madrigal with the passionate pacifism and the loving compassion that was all Tippett 's own.

For fans of Tippett , though there were surely later works and arguably even greater works, A Child of Our Time is the work nearest and dearest to their hearts. And for fans of Tippett , the greatest performance of the work, the performance that gets closest to the composer's passionate compassion, was his own recording made in 1991 when Tippett was still a spry 85 years old. Leading the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Chorus along with a cracker-jack crew of vocal soloists, Tippett 's performance is almost unbearably moving -- the songs of the soloists, the fugues of the chorus, and the heartrending spirituals -- and is so affecting that it is nearly impossible to remain untouched. Reissued from a superb digital recording originally made by Collins Classics, Naxos' remastering is absolutely translucent, allowing the performance to shine through in all its sublime transcendence. Track Listing TIPPETT, M.: Child of Our Time (A) (F. Robinson, S. Walker, J. Garrison, J.

Cheek, City of Birmingham Symphony, Tippett) Sir Michael Tippett (1905–1998) A Child of Our Time Michael Tippett was one of the most gifted and most inspiring figures in twentieth-century British musical life. He was born on 2nd January 1905 in London, but grew up in a village in the East Anglian county of Suffolk and at a succession of boarding schools. Because his parents lived most of the time on the Continent, he travelled extensively in Europe, acquiring facility in languages and an unusually international outlook. Childhood piano lessons and concert-going prompted the ambition of becoming a composer, which was furthered by study at the Royal College of Music in London between 1923 and 1928, and later by private lessons with R.O. Morris. During the 1930s Tippett lived in the Surrey countryside south of London, earning a frugal living from teaching, and becoming involved in left-wing politics.

He withheld most of his compositions of that period: his earliest published works are his First String Quartet, completed in 1935 (and in fact rewritten eight years later), and the first of his four Piano Sonatas, composed in 1936–38. Early in the Second World War, Tippett was appointed Director of Music at Morley College, an adult education institute in south London; he was to hold the post until 1951, conducting the Morley Choir in numerous concerts of early and new music. A lifelong pacifist, he was imprisoned for three months in 1943 as a conscientious objector, but his stock as a composer rose gradually, through performances and broadcasts of works including his Concerto for Double String Orchestra and A Child of Our Time. These established his individual compositional voice, with traditional forms modelled on those of Beethoven filled out in contrapuntal textures – line against line as opposed to chord after chord – and melodies animated by lithe syncopated or irregular rhythms, suggested equally by Stravinsky, sixteenth-century madrigals and jazz.

After the War Tippett became well known not only as a conductor but also as a broadcaster on musical and cultural topics; meanwhile, he was working for several years on the first of his five operas, The Midsummer Marriage, which eventually reached the stage in 1955. This and two satellite works of the 1950s, the Piano Concerto and the Second Symphony, marked a peak of rich, exuberant invention in his music. In the early 1960s, he adopted more austere textures, complemented by mosaic-like construction, in such works as the opera King Priam, the Concerto for Orchestra and the short oratorio The Vision of St Augustine. Despite turning sixty in 1965, and being knighted the following year, Tippett remained apart from the Establishment, retaining his iconoclastic youthfulness of manner, and delighting in collaborations with young players and performances to young audiences.

He became especially popular in the United States: his visits there brought a new swathe of influences, from both American classical music and popular culture, into such works of the 1970s as the operas The Knot Garden and The Ice Break and the Third Symphony; and American commissions or cocommissions in the 1970s and 1980s resulted in his Fourth and last Symphony, his evening-long choral work The Mask of Time, and his last opera New Year. Something of Tippett’s early lyricism returned in his later works, which also include a Triple Concerto, the last of his five String Quartets, and his farewell to composition, The Rose Lake for orchestra. In his autobiography, Those Twentieth Century Blues, Tippett declared with characteristic optimism ‘My real hope is to see in the new millennium’; but he died in 1998, six days after his 93rd birthday.

Tippett wrote his oratorio A Child of Our Time between 1939 and 1941; its first performance, at the Royal Adelphi Theatre in London in March 1944, was one of the outstanding artistic events in the capital during the War. As later with all his operas, he wrote his own text; at one stage, he asked the great poet T.S. Eliot to write it, but on seeing his draft outline Eliot advised Tippett to complete it himself, as anything he might write would be so overtly poetic as to get in the way of the music. The work was inspired by an incident which took place in Paris in November 1938: a seventeen-yearold Polish Jew, a refugee whose family had been arrested by the Gestapo and stranded with thousands of others at the Polish frontier, and who was himself being sheltered illegally in France by his uncle and aunt, shot and killed a diplomat at the German Legation. He was tried and imprisoned by the French authorities; and the Nazis, by way of reprisal for the killing, launched one of their most savage pogroms in Germany and Austria, the notorious ‘Kristallnacht’.

Tippett’s libretto does not simply narrate these events, but views them at one remove, from the standpoint of a non-believer, a convinced pacifist, and an admirer of the writings of the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. Its central theme is the need for each individual to come to terms with his or her own evil side, rather than project it on to an enemy – because the two sides of the personality are complementary, and both necessary, like winter and spring, darkness and light. This is stated most clearly in the unexpectedly hopeful passage in Part Three in which the tenor soloist and then the chorus sing: ‘I would know my shadow and my light, so shall I at last be whole.’ The music of A Child of Our Time similarly reconciles and integrates apparent opposites. The overall form of the work, the composer himself said, recalls the tripartite arrangement of Handel’s Messiah, in which the first part consists of ‘great but general prophecies’, the second of narrative, and the third of ‘commentary and judgment’.

Within this framework, there are more specific reminiscences of Handel’s oratorios and of Bach’s Passion settings, in such things as the dual rôles of the soloists as characters in the drama and commentators, the choral ‘crowd scenes’, among them the double chorus of persecutors and persecuted in Part Two, the frequent use of fugal texture, the constantly varying instrumental colours of successive numbers or sections, and most obviously the familiar first-inversion chords which herald the solo bass’s passages of narrative recitative. But the musical language of the work is by no means pastiche: it is Tippett’s own, recognisably English, especially in its madrigal-like adherence to the natural stresses of the words against the underlying pulse, and coloured by echoes of jazz and popular music such as the tango rhythm of the tenor’s ‘I have no money for my bread’. These go halfway to meet one of the most striking features of the work, the Negro spirituals which are introduced from time to time to comment on the actions and emotions of the drama, in the same way as the Lutheran chorales in Bach’s Passions.

The spirituals are included as the songs of the victims of oppression in another generation and on another continent, and through their very familiarity they emphasize the relevance to us of the events Tippett describes and comments on: more than sixty years later, the anguished boy is still ‘a child of our time’. Anthony Burton A Child of Our Time | Hollywood Bowl A Child of Our Time Last Modified: May 14, 2012 Orchestration: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, cymbals, strings, chorus, and soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, and bass soloists. First Los Angeles Philharmonic performance: March 23, 1978, with soprano Carmen Balthrop, mezzo-soprano Jennifer Jones, tenor Michael Best, bass Marvin Hayes, and the Los Angeles Master Chorale and Interdenominational Choirs, Sir Michael Tippett conducting.

"The morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." -- Job, 38:7 "…the darkness declares the glory of light." -- T. S. Eliot, from Murder in the Cathedral, quoted on the title page of Tippett’s A Child of Our Time Social activism is not the first thing that comes to mind when one recalls details of great composers’ lives. Of course, the story of Beethoven furiously erasing his Eroica Symphony’s dedication to Napoleon is legend. Unhappy with the marauding Emperor for abandoning the principles that the French Revolution -- and Napoleon -- had stood for until 1804, Beethoven decided enough was enough. Not terribly heroic stuff, really, but noteworthy for a composer. Sir Michael Tippett, on the other hand, was a man who took risks in the name of political and social causes throughout his career. He held steadfastly to messages of universal understanding and brotherhood in his music, in his writings, and in his personal life. A famous example from Tippett’s life was his arrest and subsequent jailing in the early 1940s as a conscientious objector.

His opera librettos and vocal texts also often contend with social issues and topics such as Jungian psychoanalysis, racial tension, and homosexuality, among others. His The Knot Garden (1966-69) is the first opera to portray an openly gay couple; the plot of The Ice Break (1973-76) encompasses conflicts of race and intergenerational issues. His last opera, New Year (1985-88), features two orphans, one white and one black, whose foster mother is a psychologist and a bit of a social misfit. Not exactly your typical operatic characters. A Child of Our Time, an oratorio which acknowledges and draws from the tradition of both George Frideric Handel and J.S. Bach, is perhaps Tippett’s most famous work. He began writing the oratorio at the very beginning of World War II in response to his outrage at the world’s apathy to the plight of Jewish refugees. The story is based on headlines ripped from the newspapers of the day. Tippett had read about Henschel Grynsban, a young Polish Jew who had fled to France to escape the Nazi pogrom.

Grynsban’s mother and father, left behind, were apparently suffering at the hands of the Nazi persecutors. The young man snapped and killed a minor Nazi official in Paris; the Nazi retribution was severe and vigorous (his parents were executed and the young Grynsban disappeared). The story affected Tippett deeply and inspired this oratorio, a work which Newsweek magazine de-scribed (nearly 30 years later) as "something Handel might have written had he lived in the age of Auschwitz." This composition exemplifies Tippett’s typical musical style, a style born of his practical knowledge as choir director at Morley College, where his focus was on amateur and unemployed professional musicians. He created his own libretto, a practice which he would pursue in all of his subsequent operas. He was also drawn to popular and folk music; in the case of this work he grounded the composition in the African American spiritual, using well-known works as the chorale interludes for the choir, much as Bach used Lutheran chorales -- which everyone in the congregation knew -- as moments of reflection on action that has just taken place. Tippett also drew inspiration from the spiritual melodies for his own composition, both his text and his setting.

He reveled in traditional musical techniques in this work. All through A Child of Our Time, one can hear traditional counterpoint and imitative vocal writing, triadic harmonies, and repetition. He also makes use of time-honored oratorio and opera devices, including the recitatives (a style in which the vocalist, in this case almost always the bass who also serves as the narrator, "recites" the story and moves the action along), the aria (songs in which individual vocal soloists are featured), ensembles including duets and trios, as well as the continuous presence of the orchestra in the entire work. A Child of Our Time is divided into three parts, each part corresponding to a particular section of the newspaper story which spawned the oratorio. Tippett used both Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s Passions as a foundation: he substituted Negro spirituals for what would have been the traditional Lutheran chorales in a Bach work, for example. According to Tippett himself, these spirituals (which Tippett altered to be more harmonically static than the original spirituals) serve as moments of repose and reflection between other sections in the oratorio.

According to Tippett, he borrowed the three-part macro-structure of Messiah as a model for his oratorio: "Part I deals with the general state of oppression in our time; Part II presents… the story of a young man’s attempt to seek justice… and the catastrophic consequences; while Part III considers the moral to be drawn, if any." Indeed, the first part prepares the scene, as the "darkness" is revealed. Evil has gripped the land ("pogroms in the East, lynchings in the West," among the many calamities), and the tenor soloist (who represents the Jewish boy) is despondent: "how can I grow to a man’s stature?" The first section ends with the spiritual "Steal Away to Jesus." (This spiritual is also a reference to stealing away, as in escaping from captivity.) The persecutors and persecuted are caught in a whirlpool of hate, into which the second section of the oratorio plunges headlong. The scapegoat -- the child of our time -- is identified.

By using the African American as his source for the music, and the European Jew as his inspiration for the libretto, Tippett has indeed encapsulated "scapegoatism" in two of its most heinous manifestations in recent history. After reaching the breaking point, the young boy (the tenor) snaps and kills his "dark brother": "his other self rises in him, demonic and destructive. He shoots the official…" The second section ends with the chorus recalling the story of the Israelites’ bondage in Egypt ("Go Down, Moses"), a hymn which symbolized the similar fate of African Americans. In the final section, Tippett attempts to make sense of the events that have transpired -- in this case, the egregious violence, the suffering, and the deprivation that has just occurred. The composer’s message is clear: recrimination and vengeance are not the answer. According to Tippett, we must first seek compassion for our fellow humans and find a way to embrace even the darkness that lies in wait within us all. The text for A Child of Our Time was prepared by Tippett himself, though he had originally asked poet T. S. Eliot to write it.

Eliot said that he would, but needed Tippett to "do his homework for him" and outline what he had in mind, how many songs, which would feature soloists, which chorus, etc. Tippett’s sketches for Eliot were so complete, and in such direct and elegantly simple language, that Eliot felt that his contribution would be at odds with Tippett’s text. Eliot suggested that Tippett complete the text himself, which he did. Perhaps because of its universal themes, straightforward language, and often traditional musical materials, A Child of Our Time has endured and become Tippett’s most recorded and performed work; the gospel chorale interludes have even been excerpted for performance separate from the oratorio. It may well be that the work’s universal, truly premonitory quality, has also kept this oratorio in the repertoire.

Tippett addressed this issue himself, writing 35 years later in Music of the Angels (from 1980 -- a few years after the Pol Pot regime’s massacres in Cambodia and several years before Slobadon Milosevic’s rampages in Bosnia and Kosovo): "When I wrote the work, I was so engulfed in the actions of the period, I never considered its prophetic quality. But it seems that the growing violence springing out of divisions of nation, race, religion, status, color, or even just rich and poor is possibly the deepest present threat to the social fabric of all human society." A Child of Our Time was premiered on March 19, 1944 by the London Civil Defense and Morley College Choirs with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, led by Walter Goehr, at the Royal Adelphi Theatre in London. Peter Pears was the tenor soloist; Joan Cross [the creator of the role of Ellen Orford in Britten’s Peter Grimes] was the soprano. Composer Dave Kopplin, who holds a Ph.D. from UCLA, is a writer and program editor for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Hollywood Bowl.

He also is a lecturer in music at Loyola Marymount University. Michael Tippett. A Child of Our Time. Spirituals. Tiffin Boys Choir. - YouTube Michael Tippett. A Child of Our Time. Spirituals. Tiffin Boys Choir. Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Published on Jan 6, 2016 Michael Kemp Tippett. A Child of Our Time (Spirituals). Санкт-Петербург. Яани кирик. Лето 2015 года. Концерт фестиваля "Поющий мир". Tiffin Boys Choir. Simon Toyne - Director of Music. 1. Steal Away. 2. Nobody knows the trouble I see. 3. Deep River. A Child of Our Time is a secular oratorio by the British composer Michael Tippett (1905–98), who also wrote the libretto.

Composed between 1939 and 1941, it was first performed at the Adelphi Theatre, London, on 19 March 1944. The work was inspired by events that affected Tippett profoundly: the assassination in 1938 of a German diplomat by a young Jewish refugee, and the Nazi government's reaction in the form of a violent pogrom against its Jewish population—the so-called Kristallnacht. Tippett's oratorio deals with these incidents in the context of the experiences of oppressed people generally, and carries a strongly pacifist message of ultimate understanding and reconciliation. The text's recurrent themes of shadow and light reflect the Jungian psychoanalysis which Tippett underwent in the years immediately before writing the work. The oratorio uses a traditional three-part format based on that of Handel's Messiah, and is structured in the manner of Bach's Passions. The work's most original feature is Tippett's use of American spirituals, which carry out the role allocated by Bach to chorales. Tippett justified this innovation on the grounds that these songs of oppression possess a universality absent from traditional hymns.

A Child of Our Time was well received on its first performance, and has since been performed all over the world in many languages. A number of recorded versions are available, including one conducted by Tippett when he was 86 years old. Category

Question: Which composer wrote the 1944 oratorio "A Child of our Time"?
Answer: Michael Tippet